No, Big Ben Is Not A Clock Tower In London (But It Sorta Is)

On May 31, 1859, London rang the bell on its newest clock tower. The people of London enjoyed the perfect pitch of Big Ben for the first time, a sound which would echo into the modern age, a symbol of England’s former position as the world’s superpower.

The construction of the new clock tower was part of the redesign of Westminster Palace, nearly burned to the ground in the 1830s.

Had the blaze been an act of terrorism, the erection of the clock tower might have foreshadowed the events that would befall New York City on September 11th, 2001.

That was the day a fire destroyed the city’s gem, the palace. The determination of the people was to build something better in its place.

What followed was the usual bureaucratic red tape, which slows anything important. It would be 25 years before Big Ben could signal the recovery.

Edmund Becket Dennison

Under the insistence of the royal astronomer, Sir George Airy, the clock tower for the rebuild would have impeccable accuracy.

At the time, many felt Airy’s goals were unreachable, but then he brought in Edmund Beckett Denison to facilitate the design. Denison was a horologist, an expert in the science of time measurement.

He designed the clock, then commissioned a company by the name of E.J. Dent & Co. to manufacture it. They had their part of the tower completed in 1854, five years before builders completed the actual tower.

Denison’s design was everything Airy had hoped for, pinpoint-accurate, and beautiful clock. There was only one problem. The hammer Denison designed to ring the bell cracked it later that year.

If one considers the technology available today versus back then, a twenty-five-year turnaround beats the timeline for rebuilding the WTC in New York. Of course, Big Ben is no skyscraper either, and America does bureaucracy so much better than anyone.

[insert: snort]

The tower survived two world wars and didn’t stop during either one, despite an attack during the Second World War. The first time the clock broke was in 1941 when a worker dropped a hammer into the gears.

There have been adjustments and minor incidents over the years, but to this day it remains the engineering marvel intended by Sir Airy.